What's Up - Your guide to what's happening in Fayetteville, AR this week!
Issue link: http://www.epageflip.net/i/1464785
8 WHAT'S UP! APRIL 17-23, 2022 COVER STORY Indigenous dishes on the menu at MONAH BECCA MARTIN-BROWN NWA Democrat-Gazette N ico Albert grew up in California being asked "what are you?" — which she describes as a "rudely worded way of demanding to know my race in social situations … an uncomfortable and super-complicated question to hear as a young woman trying to figure out precisely that." "When I got to Oklahoma, without offering any indication of my heritage to folks I met, I was asked 'what tribe are you?'" she remembers. "Simply being recognized as Native and given the opportunity to acknowledge and share that part of myself lifted a burden from my shoulders that I had no idea I had been carrying my whole life. I felt seen, finally." It didn't take long before Albert was also making herself heard. With an Acadian father, a Cherokee mother and a family that loved to both cook and tell stories about food, she was naturally interested in the "whole world of foods I had not grown up eating, but that I immediately felt a connection with. I met so many different folks just socially, or at work in restaurants, and when my Cherokee heritage came up and I expressed any level of pride or enthusiasm for my culture, I would be invited to go foraging with them, or to their mom's house to learn to make frybread. Just by being open to learning, opportunities presented themselves to me at every turn." And those lessons paid off when she was hired as executive chef at Duet Restaurant + Jazz in Tulsa. "At that point in my career, I had been an executive chef and chef de cuisine before, with the ability to create specials and have some level of creative control over menus, but Duet was my first opportunity to design and build a restaurant from the ground up," Albert explains. "I learned so much in that process and was really able to stretch my wings creatively. "Being that Duet was a restaurant and also a jazz club, I used the experimental and improvisational elements of jazz as an inspiration for the menu," she goes on. "The owners of Duet, Tuck and Kate Curren, wanted the menu to be accessible and recognizable to guests but also innovative, bright and fun. With that in mind, we created a menu that started with a foundation of familiar comfort food dishes, but reinvented them by incorporating influences from cuisines from all over the world, and some Indigenous influences too. "Like a musician playing a jazz standard tune, the traditional song is there, and you get to layer your own inspirations and vibes to make it into something new and captivating!" Albert was living her dream — until covid-19 came along and shut the restaurant down. "I had been catering traditional Indigenous foods as a side gig for many "Sometimes there were lessons, like how to make my father's Acadian family recipes for herbes salées or ployes, which came with (often highly embellished) stories from his upbringing in Northern Maine and Canada," Nico Albert remembers. "Or I would bake with my mother; she was always making some kind of delicious seasonal bread or cookies, or trying a new recipe where she would tell me about the creative little tweaks she was making, and we would both look forward to taste- testing to see how things came out. And sometimes I was just an extra set of hands, sat down at the kitchen table with a boiled chicken and told to pick it clean for a stew." (Courtesy Photo)